How Ethical Design at Blinkist Led to 23% Growth – Jaycee Day

On the podcast we talk with Jaycee about how Blinkist increased trial starts by 23%, how to balance user experience with business objectives, and why telling people how to cancel can actually lead to fewer cancellations.

Top Takeaways
⚖️ Balancing ethics and business means making tough decisions, but taking a smart approach lets you master both
🤝 Helping people unsubscribe isn’t the most intuitive thing for subscription app businesses, but ethical design patterns might be better for business in the long run
🔎 Transparency around the cancellation process can drive app success in multiple ways

About Jaycee Day
👨‍💻 Senior Product Designer at developer platform GitHub and previously at Blinkist
💪 Jaycee facilitated a sign-up increase of 23% following customer service complaints (which also dropped by 55%) at Blinkist. Even Apple took notice of her ethical design pattern
💡 “It's because of the transparency and the trust. … People have been burned so many times through other apps that it benefited us. … [Users thought,] Finally, an app that I can trust — they know how I feel, and they're listening. That was just super important: Letting people know that they can cancel [and that] they don't have to be scared of us.”
👋 Jaycee Day | LinkedIn | Twitter | Medium | GitHub

Links & Resources
‣ The story of Blinkist's 23% Conversion
‣ Ethical design pattern at Apple

Follow us on Twitter
‣ David Barnard
‣ Jacob Eiting
‣ RevenueCat
‣ Sub Club

Episode Highlights

[1:47] Origin story: From founding to freelancing, Jaycee helped transform Blinkist in under three years.
[3:52] Internet fame: The ethical design pattern Jaycee helped evolve offers subscription apps the ability to understand the product discovery process in a different light. She talks about its inception at Blinkist.
[9:05] Zombie subscribers: The balance between business and ethics isn’t always easy to strike. Jaycee explains how customer empathy helped with product design.
[11:51] The first pitch: The early stages of ethical design and the goal of reducing customer complaints initially came from trial reminder testing. The reminders had the unintended positive consequence of increasing push notifications.
[16:29] The big rollout: With things on the up and up for Jaycee and her team, they built an A/B test prototype with “overwhelmingly positive” results.
[20:47] You can stop complaining now: A 55% drop in customer complaints wasn’t just theory. Why did it work so well?
[24:03] Mission unsubscription: It may not be the most intuitive thing for subscription apps to help people who don’t want to be subscribed to unsubscribe. But this effort brings indirect benefits like reducing cancellations and increasing trial sign-up rates.
[27:21] Retain and engage: Jaycee discusses how Blinkist was limited in its tracking capacities, but it used some unconventional markers to establish that the efforts were working.
[31:10] The biggest subscription app article of the year: Promoting principles via the user experience community brings more attention and business success.
[33:48] The aftermath: People care about the ethics of user experience as well as the business side. Jaycee discusses the major ripple effect of the ethical design she spearheaded: Case in point, Apple features it on their website.